Rubber tires employing tire treads have been used for more than one century. As the skilled person appreciates, the tire tread provides the interface between the tire and the road surface and, thus, is important to the traction performance of the tire. Particularly useful for certain applications are tire treads with excellent wet traction performance. However, due to numerous complex factors involved, such as the hysteretic bulk deformation of the tread rubber induced by road surface asperities, the rate of water drainage between the tread rubber and the road, lubrication by trapped water or other possible lubricants, and the possible adhesive interactions between the tread rubber and the road, the quantitative mechanisms attributable to improved wet traction performance are not completely understood.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,667,362 teaches rubber compositions having hysteresis properties at small and large deformations that are comparable to prior art functionalized diene polymers while having advantageous processing properties in the non-vulcanized state. The rubber compositions include a reinforcing white filler and at least one diene block copolymer which is intended to interact with said reinforcing white filler, wherein said copolymer comprises on at least one end thereof a polysiloxane block ending in a trialkylsilyl group. The diene block copolymer is prepared by reacting a living diene polymer with a polysiloxane block or by sequential polymerization.